In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

SAN DIEGO — Mice raised in cages bombarded with glowing lights and sounds have profound brain abnormalities and behavioral trouble. Hours of daily stimulation led to behaviors reminiscent of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, scientists reported November 14 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Certain kinds of sensory stimulation, such as sights and sounds, are...

Aging happens to each of us, everywhere, all the time. It is so ever-present and slow that we tend to take little notice of it. Until we do. Those small losses in function and health eventually accumulate into life-changers.

Despite its constancy in our lives, aging remains mysterious on a fundamental level. Scientists still struggle to fully explain its root causes and its...

On the inevitability scale, death and taxes are at the top. Aging is close behind.

It’s unlikely that scientists will ever find a way to avoid death. And taxes are completely out of their hands. But aging, recent research suggests, is a problem that science just might be able to fix.

As biological scientists see it, aging isn’t just accumulating more candles on your birthday cake....

In 1998, Joanne Ruthsatz traveled to Louisiana to meet a 6-year-old musical genius. Ruthsatz, a graduate student at the time, hoped to evaluate the boy as part of her work “unearthing the inner workings of the prodigy mind.” While taking a break from testing her subject, Ruthsatz met the boy’s cousin — a nonverbal...

WASHINGTON — Recordings of their mothers’ voices and heartbeats may help premature babies pay attention to speech, new research suggests.

Premature babies do better if their acoustical environment approximates what the babies would have heard in the womb, neuroscientist Amir Lahav said at a news conference February 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement...

The recent spate of birth defects and neurological disorders linked to Zika virus infection constitutes a “public health emergency of international concern,” the World Health Organization declared February 1.

The link between the mosquito-borne virus and birth defects has not been scientifically proven, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in a press conference, but experts advising...

Monkeys harboring a human gene associated with autism pace in circles, are anxious and don’t socialize normally, scientists report January 25 in Nature. These macaques may reveal insights into how autism affects the human brain, study coauthor Zilong Qiu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai said in a press briefing January 21.

It didn’t take a lot of brainpower to come up with the name for a nerve cell that looks like a bushy, round tangle of fibers perched atop a nucleus. Meet the shrub cell. This botanically named cell, discovered in the brains of adult mice, made its formal debut in the Nov. 27 Science.

The newly described cell lives in a particular nervy neighborhood — an area called layer 5 in the part of...

You can thank your parents for your funny-looking hippocampus. Genes influence the three-dimensional shape of certain brain structures, scientists report in a paper posted online December 1 at bioRxiv.org. Showing a new way that genes help sculpt the brain opens up more ways to explore how the brain develops and operates.